The rothschilds, p.26
The Rothschilds, page 26
It was this recrudescent ability to move in fast on the newest that got Anthony the exploitation rights to 50,000 square miles in Canada. Through a string of holding companies, New Court could now tap monumental lumber, power, mineral (particularly uranium) resources. Newfoundland’s Prime Minister Smallwood called the transaction “the biggest real estate deal on this continent in this century”; and Winston Churchill, appreciative of the scale of the thing, termed it “a grand imperial concept.”
After Anthony’s death his two nephews, Edmund and Leopold, took over together with Anthony’s son Evelyn. Under these young triumvirs the pace has increased still more; their new Canadian empire (bigger than England and Wales) is rapidly being developed. Edmund, the senior partner, struck out in still other directions. Recently he has taken a hand in the future of British pay-television. At the same time he is consolidating still further New Court’s position as a key bullion broker in the English Commonwealth, as owner and operator of the Royal Mint Refinery, as gold agent to the Bank of England and as merchant banker extraordinary.
But the French Rothschilds are richer still. And they have become richer faster since Baron Guy assumed the reins at the death of his father Edouard. Guy, too, wields the accelerated energies of the present-day clan, even when it comes to his horses. He brought to an end a humiliation—and price depreciation—they had suffered for years. During the occupation the Germans had crossed Rothschild mares with the stallions of Marcel Boussac, France’s textile king and Rothschild’s greatest rival at Longchamps. Afterwards, Monsieur Boussac pronounced these unions unauthorized and irregular. Old Baron Edouard de Rothschild could not get his colts registered in the Stud Book, the equine Almanach de Gotha. But when Guy took over the stables, he applied a pressure so relentless that the French Stud Book did a very rare thing: it changed its mind. Today all Rothschild horses have been fully legitimized.
With similar aggressiveness Guy has fortified the position of de Rothschild Frères as the largest private bank in France. His main instrument here is the Compagnie du Nord, the railroad network which became Family property after the dynast James financed it into existence. Like all French lines, the Compagnie du Nord was nationalized in 1938. In return, Rothschild received 270,000 shares of the French State Railways and a seat on the board. But the government took over only physical assets, such as track and rolling stock. Subsidiary and affiliated firms of the Compagnie du Nord, as well as the corporate apparatus, remained in Rothschild hands. Through it The Family controlled—and, after the Nazi nightmare, controls again—great interests in metal, mining and chemical industries.
And yet it was not until Guy took over that these powerful levers began to show their full potency. Since 1950 the Paris house has performed brilliantly in the forefront of the European boom.
“He has started a new concept here,” said a high aide at the bank. “Formerly Rothschild used to be the sole investor in a new enterprise, developed it alone, and then sold some shares of it while keeping control. Today we are a bigger bank than ever, but the funds required to start a major new company are so much bigger still that no single private outfit can finance all of it. That’s why Rothschild’s used to stay aloof from some new developments after the first big war. Now they are in the thick of it. Guy uses the concept of participation; he accepts other people’s money from the very start; he acts as initiator and packager—and as guarantor. Apart from his share, he invests the unique moral capital of his name. And of course he keeps strictly in control.”
Then there is Guy’s cousin Edmond. His father Maurice, that black sheep par excellence, handed down to Edmond all his money, initiative, informality and none of his naughtiness. Edmond inherited tremendously and tremendously expanded his inheritance. Unaffiliated with the Family bank, he is faithful enough to Family discretion to keep the portals of No. 45, rue du Faubourg St. Honoré signless and anonymous. Here the young, shirt-sleeved Baron directs a staff of 150 executives and assistants, “my main business den.” From this headquarters he runs the Compagnie Financière, a worldwide organization which builds villas, hotels, pipelines in Israel; throws up giant housing projects in Paris (over one thousand apartments so far); backs Continent, the international European news weekly; finances banks and car factories in Brazil.
It was Edmond who led The Family into fields hitherto seldom associated with its name. If Rothschild could cope with the tax-oppressed, traffic-ridden, television-happy and radioactive aspects of the midcentury, why not also deal with the new travel mania? It will be remembered that Baroness Maurice’s pet project had been the development of Megève into France’s most elegant Alpine resort. Her properties here included the Mont d’Arbois, a hotel of Rothschildian sumptuousness. In the 1950’s her son Edmond decided to turn hobby into industry. He greatly enlarged the Family holdings on the slopes of Mont Blanc, and is now building an ultrachic new pleasure landscape complete with ski lifts, swimming pools, tennis courts and night clubs. He also underwrites and develops not merely hotels but entire new tourist regions in Martinique and Guadalupe in the French Caribbean. With Lord Rothschild as partner, he is responsible for the flowering of Israel’s luxury golf resort at Caesarea.
To put it crassly, Edmond is the richest Rothschild and probably the most multiple millionaire in Europe. This amiable young carrot-top (remember his redheaded great-grandfather James?), who can choose to rusticate in either of two fairytale châteaux—one in Switzerland and one in France—and who numbers among his town residences Rubirosa’s former house in Paris, is creating still another splendid roof for himself at rue Elysée.
There is more evidence that today the mishpoche is not selling but acquiring mansions. In the rue de Courcelles Edmond’s cousin Guy has just remodeled an eighteenth-century house into a new Rothschild palace. Lord Rothschild will shortly move into a new house at Cambridge. London’s N. M. Rothschild & Sons has grown too big for the big old edifice at New Court; just recently the firm has taken over a floor in a new office building to accommodate the dividend department.
And the rosewood-and-flowered-porcelain bidets of Ferrières have come into their own again. Guy has done more than reconnect the plumbing, though. After six years of renovation, he has restored this foremost tower of the clan to its full anachronistic glory. The dimensions of the demesne are as exorbitant as ever. It still covers nearly 9,000 prime suburban acres, with a farming population of 600. Twelve highly motorized gardeners supervise a horizonful of parks and pleasure lakes. Five full-time foresters patrol the shoots. The private zoo is gone because the Germans kidnaped the animals. Gone, too, is the train which brought food from the kitchen building to the château through an underground tunnel; our spoilsport century moved the chefs into the main building.
But otherwise this incredible pleasure dome is once more itself. Even the cloakroom by the entrance has recovered its frivolity: cartoons of the current mishpoche paper its walls. Other lampoons, mainly familial (with notable exceptions, such as a ruthlessly faithful portrait of Elsa Maxwell), decorate the adjoining silk-lined lavatory where, as a Family member put it, “they can be perused in comfort and leisure.”
Inside the château itself the age of Watteau reigns unstinted. The landscaped succession of imperial salons; the chandeliers, hanging gardens made of crystal and fretted gold; the panoramic expanses of jeweled guest suite after guest suite; the profusion of precious textures: Gobelin, gold inlay, ivory, tortoise shell; the luster of the walls alternated by the idyll beyond the windows—swans rippling fountained lakes; the bathroom faucets of solid silver…Did Robespierre ever live? Was the Bastille really stormed?
2. The Mishpoche of the 1960’s
In June, 1959, as the premier event of the premier summer social week the French call “la grande semaine,” Guy de Rothschild reopened the clan’s principal rustic palace. All of the Paris Family attended the palace-warming at Ferrières. An observer would have noticed that not only the château but also its owner possessed the qualities of the French branch to a heightened degree. The chef de famille—just a bit more than his cousins Elie, Alain and Edmond—is slim, swift in movement, marked by the handsome bold-nosed profile frequent among the descendants of James. At fifty-two the eldest, Guy is also boyish, urbane, inscrutable, impeccable, baronial and sloe-eyed all at once. Though a bit cool, after his Viennese cousin Louis’ manner, he conveys a piquancy recently enriched by a sensation.
It was, of course, a well-bred sensation. He divorced his first wife, Alix, to marry a divorcee, Countess Marie-Hélène van Zuylen Nicolai, herself the descendant of a controversial Rothschild union a few generations ago. In both cases the controversy centered around the Catholicism of the Rothschild’s spouse. Guy had to resign the presidency of the Jewish Community in France. And Countess Nicolai needed a papal dispensation—a privilege always reserved for the most exalted mismatings—to annul the bond that stood between her and marriage to a Jew. For the first time in French Rothschild history, the head of a house married a woman outside the faith. From the viewpoint of orthodoxy, however, there are some extenuating factors. Edouard, the son of this second marriage, receives a Jewish upbringing, and Guy’s own religious identity remains unscathed. He still occupies such posts as the chairmanship of the United Jewish Appeal in France (Fonds Social Juif Unifié).
He and his cousins divide between them the labors and leisures of aristocracy. Guy, a highly polished Family delegate to all state occasions, keeps up the racing tradition with his stud farm in Normandy and stables at Chantilly. As head of the French house, he is in natural rapport with the head of the state. General de Gaulle has used Georges Pompidou, Guy’s right-hand man, as one of the republic’s key financial advisers. And there are strong personal ties between France’s greatest general and her most influential banker. In Guy’s photograph album one hunt tally card records that not long ago Baron Rothschild bagged forty-nine pheasants at Marly de Roi, de Gaulle’s personal shoot.
Guy’s partner and cousin, Elie, is probably the fiercest, most imperious mishpoche member since the first Lord Rothschild. “Oh, he is a Berber!” one of the belles of his bachelor days once said admiringly, and the epithet seems apt, if only because he has skillfully supervised the bank’s Sahara oil ventures. On the private side he represents la vie sportive with his almost weekly polo forays to England and Spain, his shoots in France, Austria and Africa.
His brother Alain is the current Family’s yachtsman. A quiet, very baronial baron, Alain is at the same time the president of the Jewish Community in Paris and très St. Germain—a phrase connoting the most muffled, conservative, impenetrable sector of French society. The combination of two such roles is uniquely Rothschild.
The English house, being English, makes a point of being pale. While the Parisians personify the glamorous, athletic haut monde, the London branch seems to feel that perhaps that sort of thing would not quite do for them. Even their chromosomes appear a great deal more tradition-minded. The Parisian Rothschilds look as slender and dashing as any drawing-room-comedy marquis; but the Londoners tend to be a stoutish Savile-Row-tailored, Cambridge-accented version of the German rabbi old Mayer wanted to become.
They like their sports, of course. Of the three running the London bank, Edmund (the senior partner) has fished in the best waters of four continents. His brother Leopold sails. Cousin Evelyn has a polo team, “The Centaurs,” whose puissance is known to the teams of both Prince Philip and Cousin Elie.
But their athletics and sociabilities have a very quiet, almost introspective note. For someone of his eminence as the head of the house, Edmund lists few clubs (White’s and St. James’s) and is not a conspicuous member in either. He, his brother and cousin have the same right to the baronial title as the French but choose to be Mister. Their cars are very carefully medium-priced, quietly driven by the best chauffeurs in London. All the “bank” Rothschilds in England are part of a finely turned understatement. They may know the board chairman of Britain’s greatest tabloid, but they are not aware that the thing also has reporters. In brief, they take their Society without Café. The result is a prominence felt all the more because it cannot be seen or heard. And the fact remains that on Mr. Edmund’s piano at Exbury there stand, among snapshots of other visitors, pictures of Elizabeth and Philip.
At the same time—and this is just as distinguished—the English branch provides a whole dynasty’s worth of eccentricity. It is from the London house that the so-called “nonbank” Rothschilds issue, with their astounding array of vocations.
The ranking member among them is the present Lord Rothschild (Victor), the first of his title to forsake finance altogether. A Labor peer, a swing disciple of pianist Teddy Wilson, and last not least a biologist, he has gathered pioneer insights into the sex life of the bedbug, the love technique of the spider and procreation among leeches. His elder sister Miriam is coauthor of Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, an important book on parasitology. And Miriam’s twelve-year-old son recently arrived at the house of a friend in Austria accompanied by an intricate apparatus topped with a blue lamp. It was his own invention and, he explained, the most efficient instrument yet devised for the trapping of young female moths.
His aunt, Kathleen Nica Rothschild de Koenigswarter—Lord Rothschild’s youngest sister—has different though just as unlikely interests. She lives in Weehawken, New Jersey, had the Nica Blues named after her by a grateful composer, and was recently convicted of possessing ten dollars’ worth of marijuana.
Also of the English branch, though born and domiciled in France, there is Philippe de Rothschild.* For his Mouton Rothschild wines Picasso, Braque and Dali have created some of the wildest bottle labels ever. He owns a planet named Philippa, sold to him by the hungry astronomer who discovered it. His mongrel dog answers to “Bicouille,” an unmentionable name in French, but sups out of a silver dish served by a white-gloved butler.
Yet with the possible exception of the late Maurice, the Family character has not permitted a single genuine playboy. Even among the above outré personalities there runs a strong streak of purposefulness. Lord Rothschild, for example, has the record of a war hero (see Chapter IX). He is now Assistant Director of Research in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge and one of Britain’s most eminent scientists. When it comes to Jewish matters, this Family maverick turns tribally orthodox. In 1938 he composed a letter in Latin to the Pope, fiercely urging him to protest against the Nazi persecution of the Jews. He received an answer, also in Latin, as well as the satisfaction of the Pope’s compliance. In recent years he has administered, together with Jimmy de Rothschild’s widow and young Baron Edmond, the unpronounceable EJRMG (Edmond James Rothschild Memorial Group) Foundation. EJRMG contributed one million dollars to the Weizmann Scientific Institute in Tel Aviv, gave three million dollars toward the construction of the Knesseth and foots the bill for many of Israel’s archeological expeditions.
His Lordship’s sister, the jazz baroness, has been thumbs up—financially and morally—to many good musicians to whom the commercial world was thumbs down. She is the Rothschild foundation for the needy cool. Thelonius Monk has figured among her beneficiaries; Charlie “Bird” Parker, perhaps the greatest genius of the New Sound, died in her apartment.
As for Baron Philippe, his preposterous little Bicouille has witnessed some momentous meetings. The Baron is a Grey Eminence of professional skill. Late at night, when the servants have been sent away and weighty heads bend over old brandy, Philippe’s Paris dining salon at Avenue d’Iéna becomes a political crossroads of the nation. It was here that a French foreign minister changed Henry Luce’s mind on Algeria, here that the head of the Socialist party patched up a quarrel with a key commentator. At Mouton, Philippe ripens his famous wines in cousinly rivalry with Baron Elie’s adjoining and equally famous Lafite Rothschild. And at Mouton he and his American wife Pauline have created France’s greatest wine museum.
Philippe has three huge, specially constructed beds—one in his Paris duplex, one in the castle he rents every summer at Hesselager, Denmark, and one in the château among the vineyards. His dynamism is huge—and horizontal. He not only sleeps but eats, presides, instructs, phones, telegraphs, and above all writes, propped against his pillows.
Christopher Fry asked him to render his plays, and therefore an enormously difficult style, into French. With typical Rothschild chutzpah the Baron went, or rather lay down, to work. After five years of labor the first volume appeared in 1960, to extraordinary critical approbation. A second volume is on the way. It is not the Baron’s only connection with the theater. A few years ago he published a book-length fairytale called Aile d’Argent. It was dedicated to his daughter Philippine, now a prominent young actress in the Comédie Française, who married her director in the celebration that started our story. Which brings us to the distaff side.
3. The Ladies
All the literally and figuratively rich energies of the average clan member demand equally diversified kinds of élan from his wife. To keep her husband, a Rothschild wife must often keep half a dozen households and be at home in ten different fields.
“Philippe always says that women and jail [during the Nazi era] taught him most. Well, I am the woman. But I also know that I am the jail. It’s my job to make the cell comfortable.” This is one of Baroness Philippe’s recent reflections. As a matter of fact, most Rothschilds find their “cells” remarkably snug. On the whole the clan has married well, though not necessarily the first time around.
Philippe himself makes an appropriate example. His first, not particularly felicitous, union ended with his wife’s death during the war. His second marriage is something of a triumph. In her pre-Rothschild career the Baroness, known then as Pauline Potter, was Hattie Carnegie’s top designer and a New York society hostess of the first water. The formidable talents she developed are used to constant full capacity now. When the couple resides in Paris, she supervises two ménages—her garden apartment at rue Méchain, his immense duplex at Avenue d’Iéna. (Philippe feels that in the absence of a full-blown town house there isn’t enough room to accommodate them both.) When summering in Denmark, she renders a huge sixteenth-century castle habitable. (Philippe’s standard of minimum habitability may be roughly defined as the Garden of Eden.) When living at Château Mouton, as she and her husband do for most of the year, she runs the two manors Petit Mouton and Grand Mouton.
